rigorousintuition.ca

I've gotten totally obsessed over the past two years or so. Started with morels and chanterelles. Now moving into Boletes. Found some puffballs recently. Would happily snatch some cubensis if I saw it but its never happened. Super insanely cautious of course. Would love to swap notes and photos.

I'm going to add a grateful 7th way mushrooms can save the world in the sense of giving me a new obsession and reason to spend time deep in the woods during quarantine and distancing.

I gather wild mushrooms and grew up that way as local and family culture.

The two types gathered and eat every year are matsutake and morels but know and have eaten a bunch or other species.

Think may have made posts about mushrooms here.

Holy shit. Awesome. Matsutake is like a myth to me (Im in the SE US). So cool. We missed morel season this year due to early COVID panic. But Chanterelles have been bananas this year. Approaching 20 pounds I'd guess. I'm just beginning to get into Boletes but finding them much much harder to feel comfident about than expected. I'll post pix shortly.

In the '80s I had a friend who was an expert mushroom hunter. He sometimes sold chantrelles & other kinds to restaurants. At first I would always make him eat some first and I'd wait twenty minutes. But he never got sick or died, so after awhile I just trusted him. On one hike we found seven different edible mushrooms, some of unusual types you didn't see in other areas. We made a surprisingly good "mushroom stew" over a campfire.

My favorite was a rare one he called a "seafood mushroom," which smelled like the ocean and had a shellfish taste.

To pick wild mushrooms today, I'd have to learn it all over again.

liminalOyster » Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:26 pm wrote:Holy shit. Awesome. Matsutake is like a myth to me (Im in the SE US). So cool. We missed morel season this year due to early COVID panic. But Chanterelles have been bananas this year. Approaching 20 pounds I'd guess. I'm just beginning to get into Boletes but finding them much much harder to feel comfident about than expected. I'll post pix shortly.

My location is interior Northern California, about 30 crow miles from the Pacific coast immediately inland from Redwood National Park on the Klamath River. I grew up picking Matsutakes which are called locally tanoak mushrooms. There are good years and not so good years. They come up in Fall after significant rains and a hard freeze followed by some warm days. They don't emerge but one looks for raised bumps of forest duff. It helps to know that they exist in persistent patches. In Oregon they are known as Ponderosa mushrooms at times because they also grow in the ponderosa forests and their Latin name is Armillaria ponderosa. Here they grown most in tanoak patches in broken canopy Douglas-fir forests. Sometimes mushroom buyers come and set up purchasing stands and buy the Matsutakes on a 7 grade system and prices paid, especially for grade 1 (buttons with unopen gills) are outrageous. The upper grades are mostly sent to the Far East. The US Forest Service had a problem in that the pickers would follow the buyers ad then follow locals to the woods. The took busloads of pickers out that would hit the slopes with rakes causing damage. The USFS stopped that and have otherwise made it more difficult for commercial picking (other mushrooms as well as the tanoaks). Even as a local one still needs to get a permit and for awhile but no longer one had to deface the tanoak mushrooms when picked so not suitable for commercial market and there was a limit as to how many one could possess. Some years they are extremely abundant (if one knows where to pick) and some get quite large. I feel it wrong to pick the tanoaks commercially.

So tanoak are my Fall and favorite mushroom and morels are for Spring. Morels are plentiful in recent burns (they can be found on the break between burned and unburned duff. I have three places in my yard where do burn piles and two of the three have morels every year. Morels also are abundant in the Spring in the deciduous riparian forest (mostly alder, willow, Oregon ash) along the Klamath.

Alas my health is not so good and it is not safe for me out on the slopes in the pucker brush. So it goes.

I found a Calvatia Gigantea a few years ago that was much larger than my head. Two of us had mushroom steak and mushroom soup for a week. This Stammets talk is currently my favourite: Mushrooms, Mycology of Consciousness



Ocassionally find other things, like this Amanita muscaria we found on Moel Famau. We let it be.

Crazy good day out yesterday. First summer oysters in ages, 5 pounds of chanterelles, MIlkcaps, and lots of boletes which continue to mystify me. Plus all sorts of interesting non-edibles.

Super cool; thanks for sharing your haul, as inspiration for me to look harder. I happen to be just starting to get into this over here, around the Ohio River basin. I'm kicking myself for being late to the season but am still scouting out places to search after autumn rains. Trying to figure out where to spot box elder trees...

cptmarginal » Thu Jul 09, 2020 6:45 pm wrote:Super cool; thanks for sharing your haul, as inspiration for me to look harder. I happen to be just starting to get into this over here, around the Ohio River basin. I'm kicking myself for being late to the season but am still scouting out places to search after autumn rains. Trying to figure out where to spot box elder trees...

Awesome! Oh you should be in prime time for golden trumpets, black trumpets and boletes right now, no? Is there a Mycological society in your area?

I'm sure there is but I am just screwing around, rummaging around near rotted logs at parks. My knowledge level of what I am doing is close to zero but it is still fun anyway.